Epistolary Selves

Letters and Letter-Writers, 1600–1945

Rebecca Earle, Rebecca Earle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351939287
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

This volume of ten essays discusses the pivotal role that letters have played in social, economic and political history from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. The recent scholarly interest in the history of reading has as yet yielded few studies which consider letters as a category of readable material. The contributors to this book seek to redress this oversight, viewing letters as texts which can reveal information, not only about their writers and readers, but about the wider historical context in which they were written. Topics covered include the mercantile letter, diplomatic correspondence, and what these epistolary forms suggest about the rise of a polite, literate culture in the eighteenth century; the experience of immigration from Europe to America during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the relationship through the letter; and the working of gender in the epistolary form. Rebecca Earle provides an overview of how the study of letter-writing can open up new avenues of historical as well as literary investigation. This, together with contributions form leading international scholars, makes Epistolary Selves an essential text for those researching the letter genre.

1
Introduction: letters, writers and the historian

Rebecca Earle

Buisinesse, love, accidents, secret dipleasure, family intrigues, generally make up the body of letters.

(Mary Evelyn to the Reverend Ralph Bohun, 21 May 1668)¹

Letter writing is a very ancient practice. Rudyard Kipling’s suggestion that writing itself was invented for the purpose of sending letters is perhaps not as facetious as Kipling intended.² Nearly four millennia before Kipling composed his Just So Stories, Sumerian storytellers were affirming that the world’s first written text was a letter.³ The mythical antiquity of the letter form is regularly reconfirmed by archaeological discoveries. Extensive diplomatic correspondence dating from the second millennium BC has been uncovered in Syria. These earliest letters were closely linked to the bureaucratic needs of expanding empires, but personal or familiar letters were not unknown even in very ancient times. Archaeologists have discovered thousands of such letters from New Kingdom Egypt. In the intervening centuries, letters have continued both to serve the needs of the most powerful, and to circulate among the less elevated. Letters not only facilitated the development of states and empires, but also, it is suggested, helped destroy them.⁴ Letters and letter writing not only affirmed the authority of the elite, but also provided a means of expression for more marginal members of society. A history of letters and letter writing might thus embrace virtually all of recorded history. Mined for quotations, read for content, analysed for meaning, letters form the hidden underpinnings of much historical research.

Yet letters are not simply unmediated historical artefacts. The letter as a genre has attracted consistent attention from literary scholars since at least the eighteenth century. More recently, the relationship between letters and other forms of literary production, particularly the novel, has received intense scrutiny. Scholars have examined the writerly qualities of actual correspondence, and have stressed the links between fictional epistolarity and contemporary letter-writing practices.⁵ These trends are illustrated by the current cannon of European epistolary literature, which moves easily between real and fictional correspondence. Ovid’s lengthy poem, the Heroides; the quasi-fictional correspondence of Abelard and Heloïse; the letters of Madame de Sévigné; the notorious (and fictional) Portuguese Letters; Samuel Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa; La Nouvelle Heloïse; Les Liaisons Dangereuses; and the writings of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: all appear side by side in studies of the letter form.

This volume takes as its topic correspondences that are real, rather than fictional, but these exchanges are examined in relation to other varieties of epistolarity. The epistolary novel, verse letters, and the letter-writing manual all receive consideration. The letters studied here have not in the main attracted the sustained attention of either historians or literary scholars. These range from the correspondence of the manufacturing families of nineteenth-century Sweden to letters exchanged by an Austrian couple during the First World War. Individual chapters nonetheless display certain features in common. Focusing largely on European letters of the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, contributors share a concern to read these correspondences both as texts, and as concrete historical artefacts strongly rooted in particular contexts. As such, letters display the signs of the distinct environments in which they were conceived. The particularities of the individual letters and letter series considered here are not submerged in totalising discussions about the letter as a genre. The changing nature of epistolary convention is explored in a number of chapters. Nor should the letter be studied in isolation, separated from the context and purpose for which it was written. The pivotal role of letter writing in the creation and codification of familial and business relations receives particular attention. Finally, the volume examines the ways in which personal correspondence may allow the writer to construct ‘fictions of the self. Personal or familiar letters have long been viewed, along with diaries and other forms of autobiographical writing, as a means of self-expression. Letter-writers, Elizabeth MacArther notes, ‘construct personae for themselves as they write’.⁶ As Carolyn Steedman explains in Chapter 7, this notion builds on the much older historiographical tradition that charts the relationship between introspective writing, Protestantism and the idea of the self. While the personal letter has perhaps not always been an ‘ego document’, it came increasingly to fulfil this role in the period under consideration.⁷ It is for this reason that the volume gives particular attention to the eighteenth century, when the idea of the sensible self developed most strikingly. Contributors explore the process by which certain letters came to act as key cultural sites for the construction of the self.

But personal letters are not the only site of epistolary self-creation. Correspondence of the most ‘impersonal’ sort might be required to enfold complex narratives about identity and trustworthiness. In Chapter 4, Toby Ditz studies the strategies whereby merchants in eighteenth-century Philadelphia constructed authoritative, creditable personae in their business correspondence. Ditz demonstrates how merchants used letters to devise ‘plausible selves’. These carefully constructed narratives played a central role in the development of professional and commercial networks. Ditz’s chapter stresses that even the most unlikely letter might function as an autobiographical representation of the self. Letters of credit, ostensibly the least literary of objects, in fact function as narratives of loss and redemption, representing the merchant as a creditable, and therefore trustworthy trader. This process of epistolary self-construction is also the explicit topic of Chapter 5 by Kate Teltscher. In the late eighteenth century George Bogle served as British ambassador to Bhutan and Tibet. Teltscher’s study of his travel letters focuses on Bogle’s use of epistolary convention and literary models. Bogle’s letters to his sisters in Scotland teem with wild flights of fancy and playful images, which represent his mission to Bhutan as a sort of romantic pilgrimage, and convert Bogle himself into a lone wanderer. Yet epistolary identity, in common with its non-epistolary manifestations, is unstable. These letters present a very different construction of the trip, and of Bogle himself, from those submitted to his superiors in London. Letter writing allowed Bogle to assume multiple, indeed contradictory personae, which reinforced his varied relationships with the recipients. Teltscher argues that Bogle’s letters reveal the articulation of a sentimental discourse on colonialism, which was sustained by literary and epistolary convention.

In common with many other contributors to the volume, Teltscher stresses the culturally specific ways in which letter-writers created their ephemeral epistolary selves. A history of letters, in other words, must also include a history of letter writing as a social and cultural practice. For this reason the volume opens with an examination of evolving epistolary practices in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England. In Chapter 2, Susan Whyman charts the changing nature of the letter in post-Restoration England. The Verney archive, a vast collection of personal papers from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, provides a spectacular overview of the familiar letter during this period. Drawing on the 30,000 letters contained in the Verney family’s archive, Whyman studies the varied uses the Verney family made of the letter. The chapter documents the shift from the diplomatic or mercantile letter to the ‘personal’ letter, and demonstrates the importance of the letter in the rise of a polite, literate culture in the eighteenth century.

In Chapter 2, Whyman considers the specific problems posed by the use and interpretation of letter collections, in a study based on one very distinctive archive. A quite different corpus of letters is examined in Chapter 3. David Gerber analyses the historical treatment of one large category of personal correspondence, namely letters documenting the experience of immigration from Europe to the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Many attempts have been made to utilise such correspondence in studies of immigration. But, Gerber argues, scholars have not developed a satisfactory approach to interpreting this material. On the contrary, many studies have ignored the very features that make personal correspondence distinctive, or have evolved methodologies that positively impede the interpretation of familial letters. Identifying a certain tentativeness about the use of letters as a historical source, Gerber views the letter as a site of contestation over what history is.

Both of these chapters consider the role of the personal letter in cementing social bonds. Yet in some ways the very category of ‘personal’ letter is unsatisfactory. The routine mixing of family gossip with other less personal news in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century correspondence confounds an easy classification into private and public letters. This has sometimes been perceived simply as a problem, as David Gerber notes in Chapter 3. When such letters are published, editors have sought to pare away the ‘mundane personal information’ from the putative core that supposedly constituted a letter’s real purpose. Yet why should we expect letters to maintain a rigorous distinction between the personal and the public? The boundary is scarcely clear in economic and social realms; the desire for clear epistolary demarcation into public and private represents an attempt to impose an artificial clarity. Chapter 6 explores this imprecise frontier. Ylva Hasselberg studies the economy of social relations revealed by the correspondence of a prominent ironmaster in early nineteenth-century Sweden. Letters played a pivotal role in the development of the social networks necessary for successful business, and thus defy classification into ‘public’ and ‘private’ correspondence. Throughout, Hasselberg highlights the specific ways in which letters served both to instil bourgeois social norms and to further commercial aims.

Long before the appearance of newspapers, letters provided their readers with news. Alongside the oral world of conversation and gossip, the letter offered its literate reader both information and commentary. Indeed, newspapers and other public sources of news are generally said to have evolved out of the letter.⁸ The ‘information revolution’ in eighteenth-century Europe and America did not at first dethrone the letter from its privileged position as a bearer of information. A letter from a trusted correspondent might be considered more reliable than a newspaper report. Access to the information provided in letters was a prerogative of the powerful, as Richard Brown has noted in his study of the diffusion of news in early America.⁹ This in itself gave the letter a certain political value, and a certain subversive potential. Particularly after 1789, European governments sought to control the exchange of mail within and without their borders. Letters might be opened, as was often the case in early nineteenth-century England, ostensibly to prevent treasonous or felonious correspondence. The inviolability of correspondence thus became a rallying cry for political radicals on both sides of the Channel in the years following the French Revolution.¹⁰ A century later, the systematic censorship of private correspondence during the First World War provoked outrage, as Christa Hämmerle documents in Chapter 9.

Representatives of the state were not alone in their longing for privileged access to the world’s letters. The appeal of reading other people’s mail extended far beyond the political realm. Before the creation of professional postal systems in the nineteenth century, few official obstacles stood in the way of satisfying this desire. Bandits or the merely curious might easily confiscate letters in transit.¹¹ The simplicity with which this could be accomplished does not appear to have changed significantly between the late fourteenth and eighteenth centuries. Towards the end of his life Petrarch complained of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on contributors
• 1 Introduction: letters, writers and the historian
• Part I: The letter collection
• Part II: Letters, the family and public life
• Part III: Women and the letter form
• Bibliography
• Index